@JulianAssange is no more. [Update: The account is back. See more below.]
For reasons unknown the official Twitter account of Julian Assange, the leader of disgraced transparency organization Wikileaks, has been deleted. The Internet Archive—or someone availing themselves of its services—appears to have been preserving snapshots of Assange’s account once every hour since September 18th of this year. Based on that information, it’s likely the @JulianAssange account was deleted between midnight and 1am GMT.
The account does not appear to have been suspended by Twitter, and the most recent cached version of his account suggests he had not tweeted since Friday. Strangely, the official account of Wikileaks itself remains intact and has not commented on the disappearance of its founder from the platform.
We’ve reached out to Twitter (via email) and Wikileaks (via Twitter DM) for additional information and will update if we hear back. In the meantime, consider it an early Christmas present.
Update 10:04 am: Assange’s account came back online on Monday morning (albeit with a fraction of his former followers) with no explanation about the account’s disappearance and the following illustration from 2010.
